[Mb-civic] No, It's Not Anti-Semitic - Richard Cohen - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

No, It's Not Anti-Semitic
<>
By Richard Cohen
The Washington Post
Tuesday, April 25, 2006; A23

During the Jim Crow era, many American communists fiercely fought 
racism. This is a fact. It is also a fact that segregationists and 
others often smeared civil rights activists by calling them communists. 
This technique is sometimes called guilt by association and sometimes 
"McCarthyism." If you think it's dead, you have not been following the 
controversy over a long essay about the so-called "Israel Lobby."

On April 5, for instance, The Post ran an op-ed, "Yes, It's 
Anti-Semitic," by Eliot A. Cohen, a professor at the John Hopkins School 
of Advanced International Studies and a respected defense intellectual. 
Cohen does not much like a paper on the Israel lobby that was written by 
John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen Walt of 
Harvard University. He found it anti-Semitic. I did not.

But I did find Cohen's piece to be offensive. It starts by noting that 
the paper, titled "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," had been 
endorsed by David Duke, the former head of the Ku Klux Klan. It goes on 
to quote Duke, who, I am sure, has nodded his head in agreement over the 
years with an occasional piece of mine, as saying the paper is a "modern 
Declaration of American Independence." If you follow Cohen's reasoning, 
then you would have to conclude that David Duke and the Founding Fathers 
have something in common. I am not, as they say, willing to go there.

Unfortunately, Cohen's piece is not unique. The New York Sun reported on 
its front page of March 24 an allegation from Alan Dershowitz that some 
of the quotes from the Israel lobby paper "appear on hate sites." Maybe 
they do, but Mearsheimer and Walt took those quotes (about press 
coverage of Israel) from a book written by Max Frankel, a former editor 
of the New York Times. To associate Mearsheimer and Walt with hate 
groups is rank guilt by association and does not in any way rebut the 
argument made in their paper on the Israel lobby.

There is hardly a stronger, more odious, accusation than anti-Semitism. 
It comes freighted with more than a thousand years of tragic history, 
culminating in the Holocaust. The mere suggestion of it is enough for 
any sane person to hold his tongue. Yet this did not stop the respected 
German newspaper editor Josef Joffe from stating in the New Republic 
that the lobby paper "puts 'The Protocols of the Elders of Zion' to 
shame." He is referring to the most notorious anti-Semitic text of all 
time. My friend Joffe is in dire need of a cold compress.

My own reading of the Mearsheimer-Walt paper found it unremarkable, a 
bit sloppy and one-sided (nothing here about the Arab oil lobby), but 
nothing that even a casual newspaper reader does not know. Its basic 
point -- that Israel's American supporters have immense influence over 
U.S. foreign policy -- is inarguable. After all, President Bush has just 
recently given Israel NATO-like status without so much as a murmur from 
Congress. "I made it clear, I'll make it clear again, that we will use 
military might to protect our ally Israel," Bush said. This was the 
second or third time he's made this pledge, crossing a line that 
previous administrations would not -- in effect, promulgating a treaty 
seemingly on the spot. No other country gets this sort of treatment.

Israel's special place in U.S. foreign policy is deserved, in my view, 
and not entirely the product of lobbying. Israel has earned it, and 
isn't there something bracing about a special relationship that is not 
based on oil or markets or strategic location but on shared values? (A 
bit now like Britain.) But I can understand how foreign policy 
"realists" such as Mearsheimer and Walt might question its utility and 
not only think that a bit too much power is located in a specific lobby 
but that it is rarely even discussed. This may be wrong, but it is not 
(necessarily) anti-Semitic. In fact, after reading the Mearsheimer-Walt 
paper, the respected Israeli newspaper Haaretz not only failed to 
discern anti-Semitism but commended the paper to its readers. "The 
professors' article does not deserve condemnation," Haaretz stated in an 
editorial.

An abridged version of the Mearsheimer-Walt paper was published by the 
London Review of Books and is available online at http://www.lrb.co.uk/ 
. Read it and decide for yourself whether it is anti-Semitic. Whatever 
the case, their argument is hardly rebutted by purple denunciations and 
smear tactics. Rather than being persuasive, Mearsheimer and Walt's more 
hysterical critics suggest by their extreme reactions that the duo is on 
to something. These tactics by Israel's friends sully Israel's good name 
more than Mearsheimer and Walt ever could.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/24/AR2006042401396.html?nav=hcmodule
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